A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about ‘Universities Without Walls‘. At its heart was a belief that community is an asset for news organisations, and reputation in at least one community is an asset journalists should be actively cultivating. I’ve recently been asking students – at both City University London and Birmingham City University – to complete assignments
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This post forms part of the Carnival of Journalism, whose theme this month is universities’ roles in their local community. In traditional journalism the concept of community is a broad one, typically used when the speaker really means ‘audience’, or ‘market’. In a networked age, however, a community is an asset: it is a much more significant source of information
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Hedy Korbee is a journalist with 29 years’ experience in broadcasting. She has worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Global TV, and CTV, among others. In September she moved to Birmingham to study the MA in Online Journalism that I teach, and decided to launch a website covering the biggest story of the year: the budget cuts. Her experiences of
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Last week I spent a day playing with the screen scraping website Scraperwiki with a class of MA Online Journalism students and a local blogger or two, led by Scraperwiki’s own Anna Powell-Smith. I thought I might take the opportunity to try to explain what screen scraping is through the functionality of Scraperwiki, in journalistic terms. It’s pretty good.
(Read part 1 here and part 2 here) The third student to catch the data journalism bug was Andy Brightwell. Through his earlier reporting on swimming pool facilities in Birmingham, Andy had developed an interest in the issue, and wanted to use data journalism techniques to dig further. The result was a standalone site – Where Can We Swim? –
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Following on from the previous post on serious music journalism using data, here’s some more detail on how MA Online Journalism students have been exploring multimedia journalism. Using data to shed light on dangers for cyclists Dan Davies explored video and mapping audio before catching the data bug – in this case, around cycling collisions. Like Caroline, he sourced data
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I’ve just finished looking at the work from the Diploma stage of my MA in Online Journalism, and – if you’ll forgive the effusiveness – boy is it good. The work includes data visualisation, Flash, video, mapping and game journalism – in short, everything you’d want from a group of people who are not merely learning how to do journalism
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Last month the first submissions by students on the MA in Online Journalism landed on my desk. I had set two assignments. The first was a standard portfolio of online journalism work as part of an ongoing, live news project. But the second was explicitly branded ‘Experimental Portfolio‘ – you can see the brief here. I wanted students to have a
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